The brief facts of Oxford’s life are as follows. He
was born on 12 April 1550 at Castle Hedingham in Essex, the only son of
John de Vere, 16th Earl of Oxford, and his second wife, Margery Golding. He
had two siblings, a half-sister, Katherine, by his father’s first
marriage to Dorothy Neville, and a sister, Mary. After his father’s
death on 3 August 1562 he became a ward of the Queen, and came to live
in London. He inherited the office of Lord Great Chamberlain of England
and lands worth £2250 a year from his father, but also a result of
his wardship and the mismanagement of his inheritance during his minority
he incurred a substantial debt to the Queen in the Court of Wards. That
debt, together with the expense of life as an Elizabethan courtier, eventually
ruined him financially, and all his inherited lands were sold during his
lifetime, although he purchased land in London known as the Great Garden at Christchurch which he owned at his death. In December 1571 he married Sir William Cecil’s daughter,
Anne, by whom he had three daughters, Elizabeth, Bridget and Susan, and
two other children who died as infants, a son whose name is not known and
a daughter, Frances. While married to Anne Cecil, from whom he was
estranged for five and a half years, he had an illegitimate son, Edward
Veer, born on 21 March 1581. In 1591, three years after Anne Cecil’s
death in 1588, Oxford married Elizabeth Trentham, by whom he had an only
son and heir, Henry de Vere, later 18th Earl of Oxford. Over the
years, Oxford became disenchanted with the peripatetic life of a courtier,
and after his marriage to Elizabeth Trentham spent his remaining years
at King's Place in Hackney. He died there on 24 June 1604.